fedora

When it comes to operating systems for the TI OMAP4 PandaBoard and PandaBoard ES, Ubuntu Linux is usually the winner for several reasons. However, with last month's release of Fedora 17 for ARM, how is the Red Hat sponsored distribution running on these ARM development boards?

THE RED HAT sponsored Fedora Linux distribution believes a 64-bit ARM architecture will prove to be the tipping point for ARM servers. - The Fedora Project, which is heavily sponsored by enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat, has seemingly been lagging behind Canonical's Ubuntu Linux distribution following a round of server announcements from Dell and HP professing certification for Ubuntu. However Jon Masters, principal software engineer at Red Hat and leader of Fedora's ARM effort told The INQUIRER that 64-bit ARM chips will prove to be the killer feature for ARM-based servers.

While Fedora 17 should be released next week, the ARM version is lagging behind and has just reached its own beta milestone. The Beefy Miracle for ARM isn't in quite as good shape as the i686 and x86_64 binaries, but at least now it's reaching beta. This architecture is handled by a separate Fedora (ARM) community team.

In anticipation of the arrival of my Raspberry pi I decided that I could wait no longer and decided to have a look at one of the Raspberry pi OS's. Due to the Raspberry pi having an arm processor, running the Raspberry pi Fedora remix within virtualbox would not be possible.

It took several weeks longer than planned, but the "recommended" Linux distribution for the Raspberry Pi, the credit-card sized computer that retails for $35, Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix is finally ready to run.

Raspberry Pi is the name given to an ultra-low-cost computer that went on sale recently for just $35. The bare-bones PC, which is built to run a few different flavors of Linux, is capable of hooking up to a mouse, keyboard, HDTV and Ethernet. Initial interest has been strong -- the first batch quickly sold out.

According to an email from openSUSE developer Andrew Wafaa, a group of openSUSE developers are working on implementing full support for ARM processor cores in version 12.2 of the distribution, due to be released in July. The email summarises the key points from, and results of, a discussion between developers interested in an ARM port.

Developers at the Seneca College released a version of Fedora Remix ARM that's optimized for the Raspberry Pi. Fedora Remix is itself a lightweight version of the open-source Red Hat Linux derivative, which is now further optimized for this $25 self-contained hobby-kit computer. The new Fedora Remix variant fits in a 2 GB SD card that the Raspberry Pi boots from.

Raspberry Pi has been designed to inspire a new generation of teenage computer programmers, by a team of Cambridge entrepreneurs and academics frustrated by the lack of computer science talent emerging from schools. Much awaited, it should be availble in the next week or so.

Several operating systems will be able to run on the Raspberry Pi boards. However, the Raspberry Foundation had announced that they were working with Red Hat to deliver a Fedora release optimized for the board and Broadcom BCM2835 processor (ARMv6 + hard-float support).

The performance of the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 OMAP4460 configuration as found on the PandaBoard ES is quite commendable and in this Phoronix review the dual-core 1.2GHz ARM system with PowerVR SGX540 graphics is being compared to several Intel Atom, Pentium M, and Core Duo configurations running Ubuntu Linux throughout. To spice things up, the pre-production OLPC XO-1.75 was also thrown into the testing mix with its single-core ARMv7 800MHz Sheeva processor.

Like most distributions, Fedora uses binary software packages (RPMs in this case) to manage installed software. These packages are built using complex sets of build dependencies (other software packages), some of which are not explicit dependencies but rather implied through their fixed presence in the standard "buildroots" (chroot environments containing a basic set of packages) used in the Fedora build infrastructure.

The Fedora distribution is often associated with laptops and desktops using x86 processors. These systems are cheap, powerful, and readily available to developers, and so it would naturally follow that they would be well supported. But Fedora has long supported systems based upon architectures other than the venerable x86.

The Raspberry Pi is a $25/$35 computer based on a Broadcom ARM chip. The Fedora ARM secondary architecture project has ported the Fedora Linux distribution to ARM-based devices. Faculty and students at Seneca College involved with the Fedora ARM project are configuring and optimizing it to work with the Raspberry Pi.

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